Showdown
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: It's a post Portable Ops Patriot poker party! Para-Medic/EVA, BB/Ocelot, spoilers for MGS4.


Written for a prompt at queerlygen on Dreamwidth: _"big queer board/card game gathering."_ :D Lots of MGS4 spoilers here.

* * *

This is the third time in the last two months so I guess it's getting to be a regular event, now: we Patriots all get together for the evening, we talk and we drink and we play poker. Four of us, anyway - the other two are taking their early night already, Donald because he's a morning person and he's too damn nice for poker anyway, and the Major because he's a bit of a priss. So it's just us four, kinda like a double date, except that me and Kim aren't really dating, exactly. I don't _think_ we are, anyway. Not _date_ dates, at least. We don't like the same movies.

Jack and Adam, though. They probably, I don't know, go out and shoot things together. Boy stuff.

It's been a pretty good night if you're just looking at each hand one at a time but overall, we're going nowhere. We're too evenly matched, is the problem.

Me, I do the math. It's my favourite kind of fun, probabilities changing every time someone turns over a card, and my mind's racing to catch each few-percent advantage before it runs away from me, before any of the others can move in on it. It's not enough. Kim's poker face is _incredible_, it's this perfect animated mask of smiles and little twitches and moments when she lays her cards on her lap and sits back to redo her lipstick and whatever pattern any of us are trying to see in it, it's not there. And every time you peer over at her to try, you just end up revealing all your feelings to _her_. She's driving me crazy but, on the other hand, she's _driving me crazy _and she knows it and we all know I'm the only one who's likely to be going home with her tonight. Probably. I'm doing the math.

Jack is acting like he's playing calm, cigar held between two fingers and blue eye passing over us one by one, like he's surveying the terrain, and then he zeroes in on the chips piled up on the table - our artillery. (Adam, I guess as an attempt to tease him, has shaped his stack into a fort, with a tall round tower at each corner and a little moat made of slightly overlapping blue ones and some lookout holes in the walls for his snipers.) He knows what we've got left, how much of it we're prepared to risk (me; usually not so much), and when to go for the kill.

And Adam has the luck of the devil. He sometimes finds outs in hands where, statistically, there's no way it should happen, and then he twirls his fingers and acts like he knew it would work out all along.

Kim has one knee folded up against the card table; she's pretending to pretend not to think, I think. I cross my ankles together and try to project this air of _totally not losing this round_ - not sure how convincing I am there. Jack and Adam are playing footsie. You can tell by the rattle of spurs under the table and the way the corner of Jack's mouth is just slightly turning upwards behind all that smoke and stubble. I'm surprised neither has broken a toe yet, but in case they do, I'm right here. Kim's looking at them and somehow using that to work out exactly how well they think they're doing this hand, I don't know how but she is, so I fold. I only had an 18.6% chance anyway. Adam smirks at me, but I ignore the blond asshole (I love him really, how could I not?) and glare into my glass of G&T.

He doesn't win this one anyway. Jack does.

Jack was a hair behind before (he takes bad risks sometimes) so this really only makes it _worse_, and I think Adam can tell that - he enjoys these nights more than the rest of us put together and I think he notices when they get slow. It was Kim's deal, last time, and she's gathering up cards and splicing them into the deck when he says; "Wait."

Jack's pouring more whiskey for Kim and himself, a slow smooth dram in the bottom of each glass, no soda water spoiling either. "Yeah?"

"We could stay here all night passing chips around. Or we could have one final hand...with some _unconventional_ wagers."

Huh? I look over at Jack, to see if he has half a clue what Adam's talking about. I don't need to be Kim to work out that he doesn't, though I guess that Kim has indeed worked that out. "Such as?" she says, and Jack says "Unconventional wagers?" at the same exact moment and somehow that leads to Adam addressing his answer at me.

"We abandon our current stockpiles, and we each propose a wager that the person on our left will offer. The winning player will receive whatever they requested from their neighbour."

Huh. "And the other two losers?"

"They lose." He shrugs. "What have we ever taken from each other anyhow? We're friends. Patriots. For us, it's _winning_ that counts."

Kim's grinning like she's seriously considering it (or she could just be doing that to throw us off, though there aren't even any cards on the table right now) and Jack's smiling for real now, like he knows _exactly_ what he's wanting from the girl sat on his left and has just been waiting for the chance to demand it. (I'm the girl on his right. Isn't that convenient?) "I'm in," he says, and where he goes the rest of us follow, us and his whole damn army.

Kim's showing him this pearly smile, the cards still passing from hand to hand as she thoroughly shuffles the dead cards away. "So what is it you want from me?" she asks, leaning back in her chair.

"Your Mauser," he replies, his grin lighting up his eye.

She raises her eyebrows and pouts a little, and for all I know that's the first real thing she's done all evening. "That so? I felt sure you were going to ask for a kiss." She reaches down to her holster and strokes the thing, just as if it were a fretful baby. But we all agreed, and I think she'll hand it over, another one for Jack's impressive collection.

It occurs to me that I'm the only one of us who _didn't_ come here armed. I almost never am. Poor helpless little me. "So what do you want, _Tatyana_?" asks Adam (I guess stressing the name because he knows it isn't her real one).

"What do you think, _Adamska_?" (She's stressing the name because she knows it is his real one.) "I want a kiss."

It's like it hadn't even crossed his mind that she was going to ask that. His face turns a shade of red, and he downs his vodka in one gulp and pours another, eyeballing Jack, who has absolutely no sympathy. Oh, poor guy - I don't think he's ever kissed a girl in his life, and I don't think he'd have willingly picked Kim to be the first (no, wait, I could be wrong there).

But he's nodding, curtly, irritated, passing the hot potato on to me, and I roll my eyes and wonder what I've let myself in for here. "Shoot."

"Very well, doctor. I want your first name."

"Oh you _jerk_," I reply, and the others are all laughing. What the hell. _Nobody_ gets to know my name. So what are they going to do if he doesn't win - break into the Major's files and look me up? They better not. We don't spy on each other - we're _Patriots. _Between ourselves, we play fair.

Mostly.

That just leaves me, and Jack's drawing on his cigar, blowing neat smoke rings up to the ceiling. "My wager?"

I can't really complain about the balance of risks here. I mean, it's all about identity, either way. "I want twenty-five milligrams of your blood."

Wow. You could hear a hypodermic drop. Adam is looking at me all curious, Kim is pretending not to be curious, Jack seems kinda bothered but I am his field doctor and I've issued him stranger prescriptions before now. "My _blood_? What do you want that for?"

"DNA analysis," I reply. It's the truth. "I'm just interested in how you tick. You know."

It's half the truth. Hey, I'm playing _fair. _It's not like I asked for a sperm sample.

An awkward moment later Kim says "I guess we're set," and she passes the cards to me across the table. It's an agreement we made the first time we ever played together, years ago; we don't ever let Adam deal. I shuffle a few times, splitting the deck in half the croupier's way, and then I deal eight cards onto the table, east, north, west, south.

Kim's the one who looks at her cards first. I guess of all of us, she's the one who's got the least to lose, and certainly the least to gain. No identity there. I almost hope she wins, because if she does then Adam will never live it down. _Almost._ I put the deck in the middle of the table, kick my face into neutral and then turn up the corners of my pocket cards.

It's the ace of spades and the ace of diamonds.

All-in.


End file.
